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==Dictionary==
The term "phallus" designates the representation of an erect penis, which plays a key role both intra- and inter-subjectively. Freud barely distinguished between the fantasized phallus and the anatomical penis. He called the period between three and five years of age the "phallic stage." At this stage, infants of both sexes are dominated by the question of who possesses a penis and the related issue of its masturbatory jouissance (gratification), which is clitoral in the case of girls. Up to this point, the mother is imagined as having a penis, and the discovery that she lacks a penis, after an initial denial, precipitates the castration complex.
Jacques Lacan chose to use the term "phallus" for the imaginary and symbolic representation of the penis in order to better distinguish the role of the penis in the fantasy life of both sexes from its anatomical role. Freud's famous "symbolic equation" of breast, feces, penis, and baby (1916-1917a [1915-1917], 1918b, 1924d) already implied this distinction between the real penis and its phallic representations.
According to Lacan, the phallus at the outset represents what else the mother desires is in addition to the baby. Thus, a pre-oedipal triangle of mother, phallus, and infant arises. At first the infant tries to <i>be</i> the phallus for the mother until the moment of a crucial transformation when the child, after identifying the phallus as a static image of completeness and sufficiency, sees it as representing the mother's desire, and thus her lack. From then on, the phallus takes the form of something missing (-') within any imaginary, and hence libidinal, frame of reference. Thus the phallus comes to signify desire, Lacan says.
The intermittence of its erection, its ability to fade (compare Ernest Jones's concept of aphanisis), and even the fact that half of all humans do not have it have made the erect penis eminently suited to symbolize the crucial issues of being (subject) and having (object) in both sexes. The penis constitutes the key element in the asymmetrical division that, according to Roman Jakobson, characterizes any symbolic system.
When the phallus takes on the role of signifier, this implies that the subject grasps it in the Other, the locus of the set of signifiers that determines the subject. There it signifies the Other's desire, which is to say that the Other is marked by her own incompleteness. From then on, the phallus signifies the Other's
submission to the laws of symbolic exchange, and such incompleteness frees up in the subject her own jouissance.
In his seminar on female sexuality (1998), Lacan further specified what he meant by the term "phallic jouissance." He used the phallic signifier (Φ) in writing his "formulas of sexuation," which posit that every human being has to be on one side or the other of the sexual divide. A woman always has something of the phallus (she is not entirely castrated), and the man is only supposed to "have" the phallus when he fantasizes his castration. In Lacan's symbolic notation, the phallus takes on the formal role of a supplement, which adds to the castration complex the fact that "there is no sexual relation," as Lacan said, referring to the impossibility of writing an equation of the relationship between the sexes.
==Phallus==
You're An Abominable Erection! You Demand To Be Raised To The Level Of Signifier, But You Need To Be Veiled, To Hide What You Haven't Got! Wouldn't You Like It Both Ways! But By Making The Woman Rigid, You Make Her Frigid! Humph! You're Only So Much Meat!
==See Also==
* [[Castration complex]]
* [[]]
* [[Dark continent]]
* [[]]
* [[Eros]]
* [[Female sexuality]]
* [[Feminism and psychoanalysis]]
* [[Imaginary identification/symbolic identification]]
* [[]]
* [[L and R schemas]]
* [[Look/gaze]]
* [[Monism]]
* [[Mother goddess]]
* [[Name of the Father]]
* [[Optical schema]]
* [[Perversion]]
* [[Psychoses, chronic and delusional]]
* [[Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic father]]
* [[Sexual differences]]
* [[Sexuation, formulas of]]
* [[Symbolic, the (Lacan)]]
* [[Symptom/sinthome]]
* [[Topology]]
* [[Want of being/lack of being]]
==References==
<references/references># Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917a [1915-1917]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15-16.# ——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.# ——. (1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. SE, 19: 171-179.# Lacan, Jacques. (1998). On feminine sexuality: The limits of love and knowledge (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1972-1973.)# ——. (2002). The signification of the phallus. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1958.) [[Category:New]]
[[Category:Sexuality]]
